Recommendation 21

The Department explained that its formal reporting arrangements did not identify any provider organisation, in health or social care, as having run out of PPE completely. It monitored the risk that social care could run out within 48 hours. It told us the national supply disruption emergency helpline, which was available from mid-March, would supply immediately to any organisation which would run out within 24 hours.32 The Department told us it had put in place a process to understand the PPE available to local organisations. This included daily calls with NHS regional officers (who in turn were liaising with individual trusts), with local resilience forums and with government’s emergency helpline. We asked whether the Department triangulated this with information from the trade unions whose members may have reported a very different story about shortages. The Department noted it did have conversations with the Royal College of Nursing and the British Medical Association “at times”, but its main source of information on access to PPE was the process of daily calls.33 It acknowledged that its reporting mechanism for understanding how much PPE social care providers held was not all that it would have liked at the start of the pandemic but told us its data improved from around May.34